Homesteading: Organizing Hearth, Home, and the Homestead

There are some very basic ideas to keeping a neat and organized household and farm. Ideas that can’t be overlooked.

Habit stacking

The first concept Jill and I would like to discuss is called habit stacking. This is just as it sounds: the building of good, new habits stacked on top of existing habits.

Habit stacking utilizes existing behaviors as anchors to prompt new actions and capitalize on natural momentum. By placing a new habit right before, during, or after a current routine, it becomes more automatic and easier for the brain to remember or start.

Probably, the most important and often overlooked aspect of a homestead, a farm or even a home, is the kitchen. This is where the magic happens. But it requires a lot of organizing and good habits, including habit stacking, for it to run efficiently. For instance, over time, our routine for making coffee in the morning has morphed into a neat, clean kitchen to start the day with. For us, this is how it works: when we fill the water for the coffee maker in the morning, we also fill up the dog dish and feed the dogs. That involves a raw egg or two, so we might take stock of the egg situation. Too many eggs and we will be making an egg-based dog food later in the day, too few – and we know we will have to conserve our egg use. Next step, when we make the coffee in the morning, we empty the dishwasher and reload any leftover dishes into it from the night before, quickly wiping down the counter. As we pour milk into cups, we grab the pill trays to take back to the bedroom and any other supplements left around from the day before. Within ten minutes, a number of chores have been completed for the day. Whereas, if we had just entered the kitchen, fed the dogs and made coffee- and waited for the brew to finish, almost nothing would have been accomplished in the same short amount of time. These habits become muscle memory.

Habit stacking allows for flexible, goal-focused sequences that one can place where they fit best. Over time, these become routine.

Routines are the time-based anchors that keep your day organized.

A well-ordered home and homestead require the development of good routines. This takes willpower, thought, and mindfulness. Such a home takes less time to run, not more.

Routines are the glue that keeps the overall organizational structure flowing.

On a homestead, these routines also keep animals and plants alive and healthy.

Many routines are daily, as described above. For those that happen once or twice a week, consider writing them down in a journal or on a calendar. Jill does both. She keeps a calendar with dates for specific jobs, such as watering plants or worming animals, that need to be done on a schedule. A good routine includes having a specific day, week, or even a particular day of the month when specific tasks need to be accomplished. She writes down a list of chores in her journal each day, specifically those that fall outside the normal routine.

For animals, the daily routine should include a head count, feeding, changing the water, and monitoring the animals to check for injuries and any unusual behaviors. By tagging this routine to a specific time of day, the animals are healthier and happier, and there is less risk that the chore gets missed.

Organizing Will Save Time and Work

Barn chores are stacked up using the same method. When I feed Jade (our senior stallion) his hay, I grab the hose and drag it down to the stock tank. When his tank is filling, I walk back to the barn, lay out all the horse pans, and layer in the grain. I stack up the pans into the RTV and then go retrieve the hose. Each job is done in a well-ordered fashion, but each job may also overlap with others in an orderly fashion – which both saves time and ensures that all of the jobs get remembered. Work out a plan in your head as to how to proceed with the chores. As time goes by, the plan gets refined, and chores are added or deleted – until it all almost becomes muscle memory.

When cooking, get into the habit of putting dirty cooking implements to soak and returning ingredients to their shelves in an orderly fashion. If you are going to return the flour, grab other items that belong in the same cabinet to put away.

When at the grocery store, arrange the items on the conveyor so that the bagger can easily put like-items in the same bag. Just leave a little space in between each category. For instance, we like to put the heavy items on the conveyor first – but grouped with similar items.

• Milk, drinks, water

• grains, flour, dry goods

• household detergents and cleaners

• personal items, such as shampoo, cosmetics, medicines, etc

• potatoes, onions

• bottles and cans

These then get layered in the bottom of the cart.

These items are followed by the light or fragile items – placed on the conveyor belt.

• Produce

• bread, rolls

• cheese

• packaged goods

• meats

If placed on the conveyor correctly, then items are bagged correctly. For instance, produce in one set of bags, meats in another, shelf-stable grains and flours in another. That way, when you get home, groceries can easily be put away. When putting items away, make a note of what items you are running low on. If your memory isn’t great, write these items down in the same place each time. It could be in a “notes” folder on the cell phone.

Which brings me to another tip. A well-organized kitchen, and a house for that matter, requires some thought. For instance, canned goods are best arranged in order (like with like, or even alphabetized) to find food items easily. Our mason jars with dry goods are labeled. The same goes for freezer storage – especially if you have products or homegrown meats. There is nothing more frustrating than discovering years later that, yes, that old memory of some long-forgotten freezer item was accurate – but the food is so aged, it’s inedible. Setting up a system to rotate old food to the front is also worth the effort. If you get into the habit of organizing, restocking, bringing old food to the front, and assessing your food supplies, cooking and preserving food becomes less work, not more.

This is just a couple of ideas on how to organize, to save time, and to create structure out of chaos.

Get into the habit of not buying pre-made and pre-packaged food items. The adage to shop on the outside aisles of the grocery store holds true today.

This highlights another key aspect of habit stacking. Time each day is limited. Tacking on new, good habits are important, but so is letting go of unhealthy or time-sucking habits that bring no value to your life, that are not leading to efficient work or happiness.

A homestead requires willpower. Choosing to invest in health, animal husbandry, and vegetable gardening is an investment in time. Time that you have committed yourself to giving to a specific goal. Don’t let yourself or your family down by not honoring those goals.

Finally, a well-organized kitchen should not be the job of one person – unless you happen to live alone. Having routines in a house or farm involves some basic steps that everyone should follow. If a glass gets used in the kitchen, it should be rinsed as it is placed in the sink – at the very least. Used dishes should be stacked and rinsed, and pots should be soaked. Each person should take responsibility for the small tasks that make a home something more than a pigsty.

A homestead involves many tasks, and some become so specialized that only one person should be responsible for them.

Typically, women tend to focus on tasks that require less upper body strength and more fine detail work, such as sewing or cooking. In our house, Robert often does the jobs that need a shovel, working in the hot sun or the cold. He does this not because he hates cooking, but because he is doing the chores that he thinks Jill doesn’t want to do. That said, on a farm, everyone sometimes has to buck hay, work in the hot sun or snow, and take responsibility for their own messes, especially children. Everyone should know how to cook healthy food because, often, people get sick, and someone else has to take over. A homestead needs many willing hands, so jump in, learn to habit stack, work together to develop organizational structures, and work as a team.

If you have children, make sure they are a part of your homesteading team. That means chores to do – every single day. Children should always be involved in chores as part of life.

Teamwork is a key part of making a house a home.

We started the day early today, with Joel Salatin, here on our farm in beautiful Madison County, Virginia – as both of us are being interviewed for a MAHA documentary.

As we got back from Tampa on Tuesday night and then had to turn around and go to DC for a long-format interview for NTD’s Capital Report yesterday, we had some issues getting our act together. But together we did!

Of course – in terms of routine and organizational structure, Jill took over all the routine stuff, while I focussed on the film crews.